If you realize that your computer generally has some amount of RAM space always free even while you are doing your work, you can implement the RAM disk. RAM disk can help a lot especially if you are in a creative field like video editing, digital art, 3D modeling, etc. In general, RAM Disk can be advantageous for any user. For example, if your system has 16 GB of RAM and your system always idle on around 10 GB RAM during your maximum software open, you can use that extra 6GB to create a virtual disk.
Since RAM is way faster than hard drives and solid-state drives, a RAM disk can give you great benefits in terms of read/write performance. This virtual drive or the RAM disk can be used for general storage but it will serve you as a high speed and low-latency storage medium.
Generally, you don’t have direct access or control over your system’s RAM. RAM is mainly controlled by the operating system and the CPU. However, with the RAM disk, you can use your RAM for reading, writing, and storing data. However, RAM Disk comes with a major drawback of volatility. Even though you are creating a virtual storage drive out of your RAM, it can’t be used for permanent storage. If you have stored some important data on the RAM disk and the your system got turned Off, you will lose all your data. This is because of the inherent working of the DRAM.
Let’s talk more about the RAM Disk and how to implement it.
Key Benefits of RAM Disk
1. High-Speed Performance:
RAM disk operations are much faster than HDDs or SSDs because it is based on capacitor storage which is much faster than the normal permanent storage drives. While the fastest NVMe drives can offer sequential read/write speeds in the range of 10,000 to 12,000 MB/s, modern RAM can operate at speeds up to 30,000 MB/s or more. This makes RAM disks ideal for tasks requiring fast access to data, like loading large files, databases, video files, or virtual machines.
2. Reduced I/O Latency:
I/O (Input/Output) latency is the delay between a request for data and its retrieval from the storage medium. RAM has extremely low latency compared to SSDs and HDDs. So, the data will be available nearly on an instant basis. This can significantly improve performance for tasks where frequent and quick data access is critical like modifying files, video editing, and software development.
3. No Disk Wear:
SSDs come with a limited number of Read/Write (Program/Erase) cycles before they can become unusable. Hard drives also wear out with time. But, RAM has no mechanical parts and excessive read/write operations aren’t destructive for the RAM cells. So, the RAM disk becomes an ideal solution where you need short-term storage space but for high-frequency read/write operations.
4. Improved System Performance:
You get major benefits in software and tasks that demand heavy and fast disk usage. This includes gaming, video editing, database management, virtual machines, etc. Also, RAM disk can be energy efficient in most cases because even heavy read/write tasks which would take a long time on SSDs and HDDs will be done within seconds. Especially in random read/write operations, a RAM disk can be very impressive.
Drawbacks Reminder:
Since RAM is volatile memory, all data in a RAM disk will be lost when the system is powered off unless you have set up an auto-save feature with an image file in the primary memory. It is always important to save important data if it is stored on a RAM disk.
Also, setting up a RAM disk is a complex task requiring third-party software because no operating system supports RAM disk natively. So, along with these complex setups, the users are left with less amount of RAM for their applications.
The third drawback is when you set up the autosave feature with the RAM Disk, it increases the booting and shutdown timings. This is because the data saved on the RAM Disk should be first written the permanent storage before the system shuts down. Depending on your primary storage drive i.e. HDD or SSD, this could take a lot longer and until the data is saved, your system will not shut down. The same data will be loaded back to the RAM disk when you turn On your computer. This will increase the booting time as well.
How to set up a RAM Disk using ImDisk?
Creating RAM Disk in Windows without AutoSave and Auto-Mount
- First of all, download the software ImDisk from here and install it on your Windows computer. Two other good software are SoftPerfect RAM Disk and AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk. However, I am going to use ImDisk because of its simplicity and effectiveness.
- Once the program is installed, you will see three new programs on your desktop i.e. ImDisk Virtual Drive, ImDisk Configuration, and Mount Image File.
The ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver will be used to manage the virtual disks along with the RAM disks. Also, this tool is going to be used to create the RAM Disks. The RAMDisk Configuration tool will allow you to configure general settings such as drive configurations along with the ability to auto-save which we will discuss further. The Mount Image File tool will be used to mount the existing disk image files (ISO, VHD, etc) as virtual drives.
- You just fire up the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and click the Mount New button in the menu.
- Choose a drive letter for your RAM disk (e.g., D:, E:, or F:). You just leave the Image File section empty if you don’t want to create a RAM disk of an image file. Select the size of your virtual disk in the second input section. To show you, I am creating a 2GB RAM Disk and giving it the name D:. You can leave everything as it is and click Ok.
- Now, in the mounted drives list, you can see your new drive. You’ll also get the option to remove, format, and extend your RAM Disk.
But, if I go to my Windows Explorer and look at the new D: drive, it isn’t ready to use. For that, I’ll have to format it first. You can format it from the Disk Driver menu or the Windows Explorer itself. I’ll just double-click the D: drive and it will ask for a format. Just quickly format it and it will be ready for your job.
You can also create the RAM disk with the RAM Disk Configuration tool which is much simpler. The performance will be the same but with the drive created with the configuration tool, the RAM disk might not be handled by the ImDisk software directly. Instead, it will work as the proxy while the different backend processes are handling the data and everything else. You also get additional features which are given in the next section.
Creating RAM Disk in Windows without AutoSave and Auto-Mount
- Now, for this method, we are going to use the RAM Disk Configuration tool from the desktop. Just fire up this tool and enter the basic details about your drive like its name and size. I am again creating a 2GB RAM Disk with D: drive name.
High-Performance vs Low-Performance RAM Disk
In the configuration menu, you can either allocate memory dynamically or just occupy the whole RAM Disk on the memory all the time. I prefer to keep it unchecked to make sure, the drive offers full performance and is always ready for its job. If you choose to allocate memory dynamically, it will reduce the performance but save memory space if you have a limited memory capacity. However, just by creating the RAM Disk without dynamic memory allocation, you will see a 2GB RAM usage spike and it will stay there because you have allocated 2GB for the RAM disk which now is unavailable as the system memory.
- Now, to the data tab in this menu, and choose an image file location in your main drive where the data will be stored before your system shuts down. Also, make sure to tick the option Synchronize at System Shutdown.
- A new tab will open with a Windows dialog to change the drive properties like its name and other things. I will keep everything as it is.
- This time, you don’t have to format your drive and it will be ready to use in the Windows Explorer.
With this drive, your system will synchronize all the stored data into the image folder (on your primary drive) before your system shuts down. Also, it will load all the data when your system boots up. However, I found a huge increase in the boot-up time with this auto-save and synchronize feature. As I tried with a bigger RAM Disk size with more data on it, both booting and startup times kept increasing more.
Running the Benchmarks
Let’s see how our RAM Disk performs on CDM tests. Here are the results for the default peak performance CDM profile.
Here are the results for the Real-World performance profile.
In macOS
In the macOS, you can easily create a RAM Disk manually without any third-party software. The process is pretty easy to do just with the help of Terminal.
- First of all, calculate the total required size of the RAM disk in Megabytes. For example, to create a 2 GB RAM Disk, multiply it by 2048 to get the total number of blocks. You can do the calculation like this.
2048 (MB in 2GB) x 2048 = 41,94,304 blocks.
- Open the terminal and run these commands:
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "RAMDisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://41,94,304`By the end, I have written the total blocks required for a 2GB RAM disk. However, you can change this number as per the requirements.
- You can change the name where I have written “RAMDisk”. Once you enter this command. The RAM disk will mount on the desktop or in Finder just like your other drives. It is now ready for you to use as your temporary high-speed storage drive.
- To Unmount the RAMDisk, use this command:
diskutil eject /Volumes/RAMDiskFor the Linux operating system, you can follow this great article.
Who should create a RAM Disk?
RAM Disk is generally preferred by power users who use resource-intensive applications for video editing, databases, 3D modeling, VFX, etc. High-performance gaming setups can also utilize RAM Disk. Developers who test applications can use RAM Disk to speed up the file operations. Data analysts, programmers, overclockers, or anyone working with random data more frequently can make use of the RAM Disk. Even if you are a normal user involved in moving heavy or random files of big size here and there, RAM disks can help you a lot with it.
I hope this helps.